@UnrelatedString Yeah the code for Axtell is still floating around on GitHub. There's no setup instructions for a server because a) we were kinda flying by the seat of our pants there, and b) there's not many strict requirements for how the server has to be set up, other than using Redis and Celery (but those could also be removed/replaced). If someone else wants to take over the development and hosting, I'd be happy to help them get set up, but I simply don't have the time now to develop it anymore.

Anonymous

As much as I would love to be able to answer all of the questions that you folks have about the situation with Monica being demodded and other mods stepping down, I can't, because a) I signed the moderator agreement, which means that I can't talk about the confidential conversations that led to all of this, and b) I didn't actively take part in the conversations; what I know about the situation mainly comes from reading transcripts, which means I don't have all of the information or context.

Anonymous

Spreading incomplete or inaccurate information is often harmful, so I'd rather not do that. Instead, what I want to do is share my thoughts on public things SE has done (and hasn't done), which will neither violate the moderator agreement nor involve stating incomplete information as fact. For starters - I'm not going to step down and hand in my diamond right now. I respect Dennis's decision to step down, and I do not disagree with the sentiments he expressed.

Anonymous

However, I do not think that stepping down is the right choice for me. To me, stepping down would feel more like abandoning this community than taking a stand against SE, and I'm not willing to do that to this site and community that I love. Instead, I'm going to air my grievances here. This may sound like navel-gazing, but the reality is that SE (and specifically CG&CC) are important to me, and I don't want it to seem like I don't care about what's happening in these tumultuous times.

Anonymous

1:51 AM

First off, since this site was first created, we've always felt like a second-class citizen to the rest of the network. SE is a network of (mostly) Q&A sites, but we (mostly) don't do Q&A here. We have different needs from the rest of the network. When the Area 51 proposal for PPCG was accepted, it sent an implicit message that we would be supported on the network, despite being a different kind of site. In my eyes, that is a promise that SE has failed to fulfill.

Anonymous

Not only have we been unable to get any customizations other than minor text changes and a flag set to allow meta posting at 1 rep, but we've been ignored a lot, too. It took us repeatedly poking staff to be moved out of beta, long after we had reached the milestones set by SE for a successful beta. It took another year to become fully graduated and get our own design.

Anonymous

We've been more or less left to our own devices to figure out how to make our weird little site work within the SE framework. And to our credit, we've got it mostly figured out. But the issues we have remaining are complicated issues - the voting system, the reputation system, the sandbox, etc. I don't think those issues are going to get resolved while we are still hosted on the SE software.

3

Anonymous

And then there are the network-wide actions of SE that are a whole different problem. First there was the half-baked idea of applying the MIT license to code contributions, while keeping non-code contributions licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. That fizzled out, because the community pointed out just how stupid of an idea it was, because it's very hard to distinguish code contributions from non-code contributions.

Anonymous

Then SE changed the Terms of Service to include a non-arbitration clause, and had to backpedal and offer a way to opt out when it was pointed out that the change was illegal in the EU. The fact that it was another decision made without consideration of the legality of the change was worrying. A few weeks ago, SE announced that they were changing the Terms of Service yet again, to license content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 now.

Anonymous

2:07 AM

Many users pointed out that this too was illegal, because content licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 could not be retroactively changed to be licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 without express permission from the contributors. SE has yet to respond and offer an explanation from legal counsel about how this change is not a gross violation of copyright law. This all left me with very little trust in SE's ability to do what is best for the network.

3

Anonymous

And now, this whole demodding situation has exploded (to put it lightly). Like I said before; I'm not at liberty to share details, but my opinion is that SE vastly overreacted, and it feels a lot like tyranny to me. I feel as though SE has broken the contract between users (especially moderators) and staff. I feel that SE no longer represents the best interests of the userbase.

Anonymous

I hope that these issues can be resolved, and that all of this doesn't continue to worsen and cause a deeper divide between users and SE staff. A lot of people are unhappy right now. I'm unhappy right now. But I'm choosing to be optimistic, and believe that things will get better. And in the interest of optimism, I'm choosing not to make a stand right now by turning in my diamond. However, if things do not get better, I don't think I'll be left with a choice.

I'm curious, would that change your opinion on turning in your badge? (I have no real opinion one way or another, but I am curious)

Anonymous

I hope that the wall of text I just typed comes together into cohesive thoughts like I want, and not just the ramblings of an unhappy penguin. In my eyes, remaining silent when terrible things are happening is not productive. I wanted to get my thoughts out so that hopefully that huge block of words can help inspire a positive change.

Anonymous

@Riker If CG&CC moved off of SE, then I would turn in my diamond. I'm only a mod here, and that's by choice - CG&CC is the only community I care enough about to volunteer to improve by being a moderator. That's not to say that I don't care about the rest of the network - this place is just super special to me. Without CG&CC here, I'd have no reason to remain a moderator.

I'm a big fan of baseball, specifically MLB. In baseball, when a team believes that the officials are not applying the rules of the game correctly, they can choose to file a formal protest, and continue playing the game under protest. The MLB head office will then review the protest, determine if any wrongdoing occurred by the officials, and take action to right the wrongs, if any.

Anonymous

As an analogy, you could say that I'm moderating under protest (as opposed to resigning under protest, like many other moderators are choosing). I'm still going to act as a moderator for the foreseeable future, because that's how I feel I can best serve the needs and interests of this community, but I'm not happy about the way the network is being run right now, and I hope that SE will take note of these protests and right the wrongs that they have done.

@Mego This idea of "moderating under protest" actually applies pretty well to my own stance too. I want to continue serving my community on Christianity.SE, so I'll stay for now, but I'm doing this in spite of SE.

Anonymous

And now that I've poured my heart out onto my keyboard, I'm going to fill the empty space with ice cream. See you all tomorrow. If anyone here wants to talk about this stuff (in a civil and productive manner, and without me violating the moderator agreement, naturally), I'm here for you.

Anonymous

@El'endiaStarman I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one feeling the way that I am, and that what I've said resonates with someone else in a similar position as myself.

I'm like a toddler in this community as I've been here only for about 1 year. But I was always wondering if a combination of PPCG (which is now CGCC) and code-golf.io could work better. Something which is specifically structured for code golf/challenge (like code-golf.io) and still has a community around it where people can comment, chat, joke and have fun too (like PPCG).

@ngn It is just about the general idea/example as @UnrelatedString better said it. I have only seen that website, so it is my only example apart from PPCG. How you are going to login is just a minor detail here.

In a structured platform there can be better categorizations for challenges (we have only tags in PPCG) and answers (for example each answer can have language and score fields so shortest answers for each language can be shown automatically or user statistics based on languages can be extracted).

There can also be other scoring systems apart from votes and so different score boards too. It doesn't need to be a platform where you have to run the code and get results inside it, but can have that feature too (like having a TIO alongside or withing).

Generally this is just something I have been wondering about, I'm not even sure if it would work or not. My experience with PPCG is very limited, so I'm not the right person to give out opinions as I cannot see everything!

But I have enjoyed both code-golf.io and PPCG, of course the joy in code-golf.io has been limited due to lack of a connected community, while PPCG can be enjoyable every new day.

@Night2 i see ppcg (or cgcc) first and foremost as a community that just happens to use SE as a platform - both in the tenchical (a db+ui for challenges and answers) and in the social sense (moderation etc). SE has been doing a tolerable job so far, despite not being designed for the specific needs of codegolf; that's why most people never bothered with pushing for alternatives and a project like axtell didn't get a critical mass. is there room for improvement? - definitely.

will it work? - well, it depends. now that the social side of SE experiences troubles, it might be a good time to consider alternatives. there's enough brainpower around to help with the making of a dedicated golf site. it's a question of motivation and coordination, and of course a question of what you mean by "will it work".

for any alternative golfing site, there should be enough motivation to maintain it and keep it running in the long term. maybe that could be done with enthusiasm alone. or maybe it should make some money too.

@ngn I would say here, by "will it work" I mean if it can keep the positive sides and combine the benefits and have a successful community around it. This is kind of too general and probably has aspects that I cannot think about it. I'm not considering or wondering about who will own it, who will run it, what will be the policies and other things like that. But these are also some important points.

@Night2 if you can formulate it as a specific question, a chat mini-poll might be a good way to reveal what the majority thinks

2 hours later…

Anonymous

11:20 AM

For reference for the money aspect - we were running Axtell on a $10/mo droplet from DigitalOcean with no issues during the height of development, and that was with some choices that probably weren't as efficient as they could have been. Granted, that won't be enough as a site grows, but it requires very little monetary investment to get hosting started.

Should we consider planning to move Code Golf to our own site off outside the Stack Exchange network?
Reasons to consider leaving
This post was spurred by recent events, but it's been in my mind for a while. Stack Exchange has been losing community trust for years. If you haven't followed main ...

Surjection from one string to two strings
This is the inverse of negative seven's question.
Write a program or function which, given a single string of printable ASCII (codes \$[32,127]\$) outputs or returns two strings of printable ASCII.
For any two ordered, possibly empty strings \$s_1\$ an...

If we go by Caleb's resignation ... SOinc has decided to require moderators to respect gender pronouns requested by the users; Monica asked for a clarification about the new rule; SOinc descended harshly on her; that made quite a few mods rather upset, which helped made the whole MSx community rather upset.

"If person A comes along and demands that I refer to them by their "preferred pronoun" (even if it is a mismatch for their genetic sex or the grammar of the language being spoken) and I refuse, that's considered an insult. Now if I avoid pronouns altogether by sticking to proper names or disengaging from the individual, that's being considered an insult too."

@dzaima first there was talk about info that would be released in a week or two, but then Sara Chipps said in her template posts: "We aren’t going to share specifics out of respect for all individuals involved"

@JohnDvorak fwiw I once went a whole day without using third-person pronouns as an experiment; nobody noticed (although it did require extra care in working out how to write sentences so that the lack of pronoun wouldn't be obvious)

I tend to avoid them as a matter of course anyway, because I normally don't know what the correct pronoun to use is, don't want to use an incorrect pronoun, and think that finding out would be over the top in terms of the actual benefit

I have been avoiding he/she pretty consistently for the last couple of months both in person and in writing. I do slip up sometimes but I am getting pretty good at it and it has only been commented on once.

Stack Exchange was never really an appropriate site for golf competitions, but being able to advertise on the HNQ bar of Stack Overflow is a better way to get views/users for a golf site than almost anything else you could do

CGCC is linked from a large proportion of Stack Overflow pages, and Stack Overflow is the Internet's 37th most popular site (probably much higher among programmers, who are the people you want for a golfing site)

@dzaima they could have come up with some quick statement, not necessarily revealing spicy details, just something honest to calm down the crowd. they could have waited for the storm to pass, then dealt with the offensive posts. instead, they started deleting posts and freezing rooms willy-nilly.

when more than a few of the most respected members of the community - the mods - resigned, it was already clear that this is an unusual situation and 4 employees can't cope with it through the usual methods.

it was definitely handled poorly, but i don't think it's fair to expect anyone to act perfectly rationally in such a charged situation, nor will focusing on people's numerous mistakes do anything to help

(fwiw, a significant amount of information is also being withheld from the moderators, which i agree agitates things)

@ngn i don't doubt they're already regretting things they have done already in hurry of trying to get something out, and learning to not makes sense, but the damage control does seem a bit (much?) overboard

@JohnDvorak btw, the "meme" post about sara mysteriously disappeared, i don't even remember what it said, it wasn't particularly funny, but i remember it got deleted in front of my eyes and that attracted my attention

@ngn tl;dr: Sara's response got used on Spanish.se as a basis of a translation golf challenge; I linked it in not-sure-where stating that Sara's response achieved memetic status; somebody went on and updated the meme database.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all?
Well, you know it's Snow White, and the evil Queen is at it again. Will Snow White be saved? Will she fall asleep once again? Will the Prince find her?
Challenge:
Given an arbitrary number (>= 2) of possibly duplicated hexadecimal col...

@ngn The moderator agreement does not end when someone turns in their diamond. All confidential moderator discussion stays confidential even when a user isn't a moderator anymore. I really wish we were at liberty to talk about the circumstances, because there is a lot of guessing and misinformation going around, but because it happened in a confidential manner, we can't, lest we get demodded and probably banned.

Anonymous

And given that this whole fiasco centers around demodding, I'm being especially careful with what I say, because I don't want to give SE a reason to silence my criticism.

@Mego are you allowed to comment on what's already publicly known? i'd be interested to know a mod's assessment of how true and how complete is the picture we (ordinary users) have puzzled together. i wouldn't mind if you just say "no comment".

@ngn I can probably answer some of your questions if you're curious as well, but it would mostly be correcting anything that's incorrect

Anonymous

11:28 PM

@ngn There's not much that's been publicly stated that I can comment on, because I'm being really cautious about what information I share (due to confidentiality and a lack of trust in SE to treat its mods correctly). Even simply confirming or denying rumors could be taken as a violation of the moderator agreement. The fact that all of this went down in private makes it really hard to be able to talk about it publicly.

Anonymous

If you have specific questions, I'll be happy to answer them - either now if I can, or eventually when SE decides to release more information.

Anonymous

I'm really not happy about the fact that all this went down in private - the paranoid part of me wonders if that was intentional so that SE could control the public narrative.